And my idea was that there are hundreds of browsers available, I just named a few to help get my point across. My point was, how would you choose which one you wanted? Invariably the mass populous doesn't know about Firefox.
If the user has no opinion, he can ask the vendor to suggest one. The point is that he has the choice, and that if he didn't choose IE the system shouldn't be either broken in weird ways or install most of it anyway.
You would have them starting up a crippled OS
If that's what you insist on calling it, but aside from the emotive words, the OEMs would be free to, and have an incentive to, assemble and sell even more capable systems than the current default all-MS ones. Maybe ones tuned for games, ones for office work, ones for kids, etc.
Basically the first time the user logs in it brings them to a website, preferably at the W3C or some 3rd party and it brings up a list of media players for them to download.
Why force this on people? It may surprise you to know that not everyone uses their PC as a media centre. I don't. Especially if they don't have broadband it's not really a compelling experience compared even to an FM radio and a TV set.
I don't need to uninstall compromised software, I have firewalls and proper ACLs that prevent such things
Who's expecting too much from users now?
Now for the patch system which you seem to have confused with patch availability.
No, but you advocated it as a solution to all ills. No matter how smoothly it works if the patch isn't available it's no good. Also, you assume that this is the only and best way to patch software. There are sites and services that consolidate patches, there's no need to hand over control to MS exclusively.
As for your other ways, cdrom in my mind is just not an option anymore, the software gets outdated too fast.
Most users don't upgrade anything until forced to. As long as you have a stable version, why bother with the "upgrade"?
Even removing Media Player hurts a lot of 3rd party products which use the player
This is exactly the problem. Instead of using open formats, media will be supplied only in locked down WMP formats if MS is allowed to force it on every installation. As I was forced to reinstall IE (after using 98lite to remove it) because other apps, with no obvious need to use the web, refused to run without it.
So if I went out and bought a Linux distro at some store, then installed it and found out that they put Mplayer on there and not Ogle, could I have a case against the Linux distribution?
FFS: No. Unless this Linux distro had over 90% of the PC desktop market, and also made Mplayer, then it might be comparable. Or in one word, the difference is "monopoly".
This would almost be a valid point except for the pure obsurdedness of the whole thing. Where does the bundling stop? You mention Netscape and Lynx, what about Firefox, Opera, the hundreds of other browsers?
I just picked a few at random. You could choose whichever you want. That's the whole idea; not to name a specific alternative.
Its perfectly valid to include a web browser in the OS simply because its used to obtain all the other software.
There are other ways to get software than downloading. I get most of mine on CDROM myself.
You mention ftp, without the browser you are stuck with the command line version.
Yes. If that's all you want, why be forced to have more? Maybe you want to run a payroll program and under no conditions want a browser and its risks of remote access.
Why should they step backwards just because the company that made their product became successful?
Giving the customers the choice of having a simpler system; or configuring it as they want. And that is not necessarily a "step backwards".
increasing productions costs for Windows by producing possibly hundreds of custom versions
I don't want to get personal, but are you sure you don't work in Redmond... anyway, you, I mean, MS, wouldn't have to make "hundreds of custom versions". Just disentangle media and preferably web browsers so that they can be omitted, uninstalled or replaced by the OEM or final user. And MS surely has a much harder time supporting the huge variety of PC hardware than this minor change.
At least with MS products you can go to one central location and patch most of your apps.
Now you must be joking... MS exploits are unending, and being unable to uninstall compromised software (or would you rather wait six months for the patch or forced upgrade?) is just terrible security.
How exactly would you download a browser without one coming pre-installed? It would be either up to your ISP to provide one, or you going out to buy one.
Aside from doing what Real Men did in the olden times, using telnet or ftp; the point is that IF YOU WANTED TO you could buy Windows without IE or WMP. And/or you could buy (or get bundled) Netscape, Lynx, WinAmp or whatever turns you on (preinstalled, on a CD, or whatever -- it used to be standard that an "Internet Kit" would come bundled with every modem) and know that Windows won't set the MS app as the default regardless.
BS, including a competitors product with your own???... Here, take this copy of Paint Shop Pro (bundled with Photoshop) hope you come back to buy PSP again..
Most of the early posts seem to be astroturf crap like the above. To answer it anyway: PSP and PS are both stand-alone products. They're not bundled with the PC. Or put it another way, if a retailer wanted to bundle either or both he could. But with WMP nestled inside Windows, and MS not offering Windows without it, the retailer would have to pay more to offer an alternative. So he doesn't, even aside from the heat he'd take from MS. That's the essence of abuse of monopoly, leveraging dominance in OS to wipe out competing media players.
And if you don't care, about that, perhaps you might care about Palladium and DRM that is being woven into Windows and its media player as we speak, with upgrades becoming less optional as the alternatives wither away.
I was somewhat disappointed that the article only included mail clients (with the exception of Outlook XP) that would run on UNIX boxes.
Note that the article "first appeared in Linux Weekly News", so that's why the foucs was on Linux compatible clients. And aside from Outlook, it also covered Opera and Mozilla, which do have Win versions.
HTML IMHO, should not be used in email...just a waste of bandwidth...Please..send plain text
Aside from the huge bloat of the Office HTML, (sometimes the message text is 10% of the entire message) it looks like crap in most oterh mail clients. The fonts are either too big or too small, etc. Fortunately Eudora allows me to ignore formatting on incoming mail or strip it out.
XFree finds the XFree86 site as well... I think some porn sites plastered the term "XFree86" all over themselves so a majority of the search results are for porn sites.
I tried the search on Google, Lycos, AlltheWeb, Yahoo, and Altavista.
The first 4 give expected links and no warnings. HOWEVER, Altavista gives a big warning:
USER WARNING
ADULT CONTENT NOTICE
The search that you have just conducted will result in the display of links to pornographic content.
Clicking "continue" and the same technical links appear. I paged through the first 6 pages and no porn.
XFree finds the XFree86 site as well... I think some porn sites plastered the term "XFree86" all over themselves so a majority of the search results are for porn sites.
I tried teh search on Google, Lycos, AlltheWeb, Yahoo,
During the Cold War black intelligence agents sometimes felt that their career growth was stunted because the best assignments were in the USSR and black people just didn't fit in there.
I always thought it was hilarious in the original Mission Impossible TV series when they were all in disguise in some mythical Pottsylvanian "Eastern Bloc" country that Barnie, their engineer, a very dark skinned negro, could blithely walk around the streets with no one blinking an eye.
When you run out of toothpaste, do you perform a complete, rational analysis of all competing products? Somehow, I doubt it. I'll bet you just go out and get the same kind you had before
I just buy whichever one is on special. One or another always is. I'm more brand conscious when it comes to things like coffee or wine, as cheap then is almost invariably nasty.
Actually it was my understanding that it was still illegal to melt down coins to redeem the base metals. I was under the impression that the metals in the penny are more valuable then the penny, but I may be mistaken.
In 1966 Australia introduced its new decimal currency. The 50c coin included a lot of silver, and shortly after the price of silver rose so that there was 58c worth of it in each coin. So the government quickly redesigned it with a new alloy with no silver at all.
Ventura Publisher 5.00 G1 for Windows 3.1 is still one of the best page layout programs. Later improvements ruined it.
One day I'll probably move on, but for text intensive stuff VP3 is very efficient. Since Acrobat Distiller 4 digests its PostScript perfectly I have no compatibility problems (Distiller 3 messed up the font encodings).
I like that I can just copy the chapter and style files, quickly edit them with Ultraedit to change the file references, and then open a new book project. There are irritations but on the whole it's much more efficient than anything else. The clean implementation of styles is unbeaten for autamted layout. Most other DTP apps, including later VPs, go much too far to preserve the layout of input text. Mostly of course the formatting of text as supplied by authors is an abomination and has to be stripped out. Main problem is graphics. Now I'm being asked to insert photographs; it can't handle large images well as TIFF, but I've found that if I export images as EPS from Photoshop that they work quite well.
If I was a Real Man I should learn Tex, but i I move on it'll probably be to InDesign.
The only nusience is of course those blasted.doc filetypes. They mostly import properly - but I don't trade wordprocessing files with anyone. If they need a file, I send html or rtf in a pinch.
If you give an RTF file a.doc extension, it'll have a Word icon and Word will open it, usually without even mentioning the format. This avoids the fear and panic users get when they see an unfamiliar file type.
I use a very old layout app, Ventura 3 for DOS (now also owned by Corel, which was actually started by some guys from Ventura). I use WordPerfect 5.1 as an interchange format. Because it was the standard back then, every competing wordprocessor had to be able to deal with its files. Word, I think, still has a WP emulation (or a special help function that lets you type in WP commands, as Excel did for Lotus 123).
We'll spend fortunes trying to extract a few nuggets of knowledge from the furthest corners of our domain while ignoring the mountains of knowledge that remain to be unpuzzled all around us.
How do you conclude that the "knowledge that remain to be unpuzzled all around us" is being ignored? Space science has a tiny fraction of what's spent on study of the earth. Also not forgetting that study of the earth and oceans has been immeasurably advanced by satellite observations.
While I agree with you in principle, I think it's "Funny" if it's just being a story being related to the readership, but would be a "Your Rights Online" if it was posted by someone actually affected by the event.
Looking back at recent "YRO" stories, I don't see any that fit that criterion.
That was all pretentious crap he retconned to make his space opera more intellectually respectable. Obviously he just took elements from Dune, Barsoom, Leigh Brackett, Buck Rogers, etc. See
Galactic Gasbag.
... the real roots of "Star Wars" are obvious to anyone not blinded by snobbery or the need for self-inflation. They lie not in "The Odyssey" or the "Upanishads," but 20th century science-fiction magazines such as
Astounding, Amazing Stories and Galaxy. The "true theology" of "Star Wars" was written not by Virgil or Homer, but Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, E.E. "Doc" Smith and a host of other S.F. writers.
But he's gone so far down market now that no one takes him seriously except as a seller of fast food tie ins. I really did enjoy Star Wars, but only the original one, the rest got more and more tedious.
Which is why Jackson won best adapted screenplay. Also Ian McKellen gave a big shout out to Tolkien when introing a LOTR clip at the beginning of the award show.
No it's not. It's been in development hell for several years. Every now and then someone stumbles over the website and gets excited, but it hasn't been updated in years. (The Comdex appearance they highlight was in 2001.)
We get junk faxes at work... it's miserable. The fax machine is exactly like a mailbox, only it's slow, and murders trees.
Set up an old PC with a modem to receive faxes. Just delete the spam from the preview without printing. You could set up some filtering rules using caller ID to catch at least some.
It's gallows humor. Some things are so pathetic the only thing you can do is laugh
Gallows humour is sympathetic; identifying with the victim. There is a very distinct vindictiveness of most of the "jokes" here, and no sympathy at all. Many seem threatened by Asian IT workers now, any story about Asia brings up a lot of negative comments.
the author should have been smart enough to make it wait several days before calling 911, so that it would have more time to spread before being found.
According to the story, he was targetting specific individuals; he wasn't trying to release it indiscriminately.
Slashdot Mirror
If the user has no opinion, he can ask the vendor to suggest one. The point is that he has the choice, and that if he didn't choose IE the system shouldn't be either broken in weird ways or install most of it anyway.
You would have them starting up a crippled OS
If that's what you insist on calling it, but aside from the emotive words, the OEMs would be free to, and have an incentive to, assemble and sell even more capable systems than the current default all-MS ones. Maybe ones tuned for games, ones for office work, ones for kids, etc.
Basically the first time the user logs in it brings them to a website, preferably at the W3C or some 3rd party and it brings up a list of media players for them to download.
Why force this on people? It may surprise you to know that not everyone uses their PC as a media centre. I don't. Especially if they don't have broadband it's not really a compelling experience compared even to an FM radio and a TV set.
I don't need to uninstall compromised software, I have firewalls and proper ACLs that prevent such things
Who's expecting too much from users now?
Now for the patch system which you seem to have confused with patch availability.
No, but you advocated it as a solution to all ills. No matter how smoothly it works if the patch isn't available it's no good. Also, you assume that this is the only and best way to patch software. There are sites and services that consolidate patches, there's no need to hand over control to MS exclusively.
As for your other ways, cdrom in my mind is just not an option anymore, the software gets outdated too fast.
Most users don't upgrade anything until forced to. As long as you have a stable version, why bother with the "upgrade"?
Even removing Media Player hurts a lot of 3rd party products which use the player
This is exactly the problem. Instead of using open formats, media will be supplied only in locked down WMP formats if MS is allowed to force it on every installation. As I was forced to reinstall IE (after using 98lite to remove it) because other apps, with no obvious need to use the web, refused to run without it.
That may remove the icons, the apps are still there and are awakened when the OS wants them.
FFS: No. Unless this Linux distro had over 90% of the PC desktop market, and also made Mplayer, then it might be comparable. Or in one word, the difference is "monopoly".
I just picked a few at random. You could choose whichever you want. That's the whole idea; not to name a specific alternative.
Its perfectly valid to include a web browser in the OS simply because its used to obtain all the other software.
There are other ways to get software than downloading. I get most of mine on CDROM myself.
You mention ftp, without the browser you are stuck with the command line version.
Yes. If that's all you want, why be forced to have more? Maybe you want to run a payroll program and under no conditions want a browser and its risks of remote access.
Why should they step backwards just because the company that made their product became successful?
Giving the customers the choice of having a simpler system; or configuring it as they want. And that is not necessarily a "step backwards".
increasing productions costs for Windows by producing possibly hundreds of custom versions
I don't want to get personal, but are you sure you don't work in Redmond... anyway, you, I mean, MS, wouldn't have to make "hundreds of custom versions". Just disentangle media and preferably web browsers so that they can be omitted, uninstalled or replaced by the OEM or final user. And MS surely has a much harder time supporting the huge variety of PC hardware than this minor change.
At least with MS products you can go to one central location and patch most of your apps.
Now you must be joking... MS exploits are unending, and being unable to uninstall compromised software (or would you rather wait six months for the patch or forced upgrade?) is just terrible security.
Aside from doing what Real Men did in the olden times, using telnet or ftp; the point is that IF YOU WANTED TO you could buy Windows without IE or WMP. And/or you could buy (or get bundled) Netscape, Lynx, WinAmp or whatever turns you on (preinstalled, on a CD, or whatever -- it used to be standard that an "Internet Kit" would come bundled with every modem) and know that Windows won't set the MS app as the default regardless.
Most of the early posts seem to be astroturf crap like the above. To answer it anyway: PSP and PS are both stand-alone products. They're not bundled with the PC. Or put it another way, if a retailer wanted to bundle either or both he could. But with WMP nestled inside Windows, and MS not offering Windows without it, the retailer would have to pay more to offer an alternative. So he doesn't, even aside from the heat he'd take from MS. That's the essence of abuse of monopoly, leveraging dominance in OS to wipe out competing media players.
And if you don't care, about that, perhaps you might care about Palladium and DRM that is being woven into Windows and its media player as we speak, with upgrades becoming less optional as the alternatives wither away.
Note that the article "first appeared in Linux Weekly News", so that's why the foucs was on Linux compatible clients. And aside from Outlook, it also covered Opera and Mozilla, which do have Win versions.
Aside from the huge bloat of the Office HTML, (sometimes the message text is 10% of the entire message) it looks like crap in most oterh mail clients. The fonts are either too big or too small, etc. Fortunately Eudora allows me to ignore formatting on incoming mail or strip it out.
XFree finds the XFree86 site as well... I think some porn sites plastered the term "XFree86" all over themselves so a majority of the search results are for porn sites.
I tried the search on Google, Lycos, AlltheWeb, Yahoo, and Altavista. The first 4 give expected links and no warnings. HOWEVER, Altavista gives a big warning:
Clicking "continue" and the same technical links appear. I paged through the first 6 pages and no porn.I tried teh search on Google, Lycos, AlltheWeb, Yahoo,
Yeah, a 27-year-old movie comes out on DVD. Wow.
Actually I got a VCD of it in China a couple of years ago.
I always thought it was hilarious in the original Mission Impossible TV series when they were all in disguise in some mythical Pottsylvanian "Eastern Bloc" country that Barnie, their engineer, a very dark skinned negro, could blithely walk around the streets with no one blinking an eye.
I just buy whichever one is on special. One or another always is. I'm more brand conscious when it comes to things like coffee or wine, as cheap then is almost invariably nasty.
In 1966 Australia introduced its new decimal currency. The 50c coin included a lot of silver, and shortly after the price of silver rose so that there was 58c worth of it in each coin. So the government quickly redesigned it with a new alloy with no silver at all.
One day I'll probably move on, but for text intensive stuff VP3 is very efficient. Since Acrobat Distiller 4 digests its PostScript perfectly I have no compatibility problems (Distiller 3 messed up the font encodings).
I like that I can just copy the chapter and style files, quickly edit them with Ultraedit to change the file references, and then open a new book project. There are irritations but on the whole it's much more efficient than anything else. The clean implementation of styles is unbeaten for autamted layout. Most other DTP apps, including later VPs, go much too far to preserve the layout of input text. Mostly of course the formatting of text as supplied by authors is an abomination and has to be stripped out. Main problem is graphics. Now I'm being asked to insert photographs; it can't handle large images well as TIFF, but I've found that if I export images as EPS from Photoshop that they work quite well.
If I was a Real Man I should learn Tex, but i I move on it'll probably be to InDesign.
If you give an RTF file a .doc extension, it'll have a Word icon and Word will open it, usually without even mentioning the format. This avoids the fear and panic users get when they see an unfamiliar file type.
I use a very old layout app, Ventura 3 for DOS (now also owned by Corel, which was actually started by some guys from Ventura). I use WordPerfect 5.1 as an interchange format. Because it was the standard back then, every competing wordprocessor had to be able to deal with its files. Word, I think, still has a WP emulation (or a special help function that lets you type in WP commands, as Excel did for Lotus 123).
How do you conclude that the "knowledge that remain to be unpuzzled all around us" is being ignored? Space science has a tiny fraction of what's spent on study of the earth. Also not forgetting that study of the earth and oceans has been immeasurably advanced by satellite observations.
Looking back at recent "YRO" stories, I don't see any that fit that criterion.
That was all pretentious crap he retconned to make his space opera more intellectually respectable. Obviously he just took elements from Dune, Barsoom, Leigh Brackett, Buck Rogers, etc. See Galactic Gasbag.
But he's gone so far down market now that no one takes him seriously except as a seller of fast food tie ins. I really did enjoy Star Wars, but only the original one, the rest got more and more tedious.
I've got a dozen Charlie Chaplin DVDs, not quite 100 years on but 60-80.
Which is why Jackson won best adapted screenplay. Also Ian McKellen gave a big shout out to Tolkien when introing a LOTR clip at the beginning of the award show.
No it's not. It's been in development hell for several years. Every now and then someone stumbles over the website and gets excited, but it hasn't been updated in years. (The Comdex appearance they highlight was in 2001.)
Set up an old PC with a modem to receive faxes. Just delete the spam from the preview without printing. You could set up some filtering rules using caller ID to catch at least some.
Gallows humour is sympathetic; identifying with the victim. There is a very distinct vindictiveness of most of the "jokes" here, and no sympathy at all. Many seem threatened by Asian IT workers now, any story about Asia brings up a lot of negative comments.
According to the story, he was targetting specific individuals; he wasn't trying to release it indiscriminately.